Is 'The Americans' Season Two Ignoring a Crucial Religious Question?

By
Terry Curtis Fox
|
Thompson on HollywoodMay 16, 2014 at 4:56PM

Even Russian spies can't dis religion on American television. That's an odd lesson from the second season of "The Americans," a show that has built its well-deserved reputation by crossing boundary after boundary, which were once immutable on advertiser-supported networks. (Season two spoilers abound.)

At no point do either
Phillip or Elizabeth sit down with Paige and say, "look, we don't believe
in this." They never detail the horrors that religion has caused. They
never even turn to each other in private and agonize about not being able to
raise their children in consonance with their beliefs. While Elizabeth's
devotion to the Communist state is treated with great dignity and respect, Phillip
feels angry and throws a vandalous tantrum at his daughter's spiritual
awakening

It's not as if the
Jennings go to church as part of their cover. They keep at least that part of
their true belief system intact. In this one instance, the show blinks --
behaving as if there were no secular Americans, rather than delving into the
waters of what happens when secularists have a religious daughter. (The church
that captivates Paige is also handled with kid gloves: despite the Reagan-era
setting, it's not a part of the then-formative religious right but rather a
liberal one that protests armaments, and at a time when actual liberal churches
were sheltering undocumented migrants.)

For the past twenty years
or so, television has been going where feature films fear to tread. Race was
the subject of "Homicide" and its descendent, "The Wire."Class and income inequality were at the heart "Friday Night
Lights" ten years before it became a national discussion. Cliche though it
may be, the introduction of openly gay characters paved the way for gay
marriage.

Television has always had
a penchant for social drama (think "The Defenders," "Cosby,"the collected works of Norman Lear), albeit often in code ("Star Trek," "M*A*S*H").
In our current age, it appears that we can now openly talk about anything.

But we can't: we can
barely talk about abortion (imagine Maude getting an abortion today) and, as "The
Americans" demonstrates, we cannot talk critically about religion at all. Programming
that is supportive of religion -- from fuzzy spiritualism to the fundamentalist
"Walking Dead" -- is not merely fine; it is welcome.

The pity is that, poised
at the end of the cold and the beginning of the cultural wars, "The
Americans" is in a perfect position to address the rise of the religious
right without preaching on either side of the battle. Phillip and Elizabeth
are, after all, a priori atheists. Their daughter is, presumably, sincerely
religious and, deprived of community by her parents' occupation, precisely the
sort of person who would find religious community attractive. Wonderful
dramatic material, if only it were handled with as much sophistication as the
sex and violence.

Given the hold that
fundamentalism currently has on American life, it's a debate that desperately
needs to be had. Only not, it seems, on even the best American television.